Q: Have you changed anything up with practices this week?A: Not a whole lot. I changed up a little bit yesterday. My experience has been…and it’s kind of carried through when you come out here thinking you should change it up, it’s not about the practices.

Q: Shorter practice yesterday?A: Little bit, yeah.

Q: More in the meeting rooms?A: No, not necessarily. We finished maybe 20 minutes earlier than normal, maybe 3:40 when we finished, versus four.

Q: Are you still searching here?A: No, no. It was nothing in terms of an attempt to do a whole lot different; it just worked out that way. Sometimes at the end of the year you don’t have to quite carry as many snaps on certain days. This was a full day, as you know.

Q: How has Hakeem Nicks looked this week?A: Well, he did a little bit of something, but not much, today.

Q: You had said that with a bunch of players nicked up, you might have them sit this one out:A: No, no. I never said to sit this one out. You did, maybe. We do have some guys who are nicked up, but we have probably the majority of them doing a little bit of something. It’s just a question of how far along we go in the next two days.

Q: Any more clarity on what happened the last two weeks?A: No. Not that I’m going to express. Let’s play this game.

Q: You have ideas, but you just don’t want to share them with us? Are you still searching?A: Little bit of both. I’ve been asked the question many times and there’s not going to be any satisfactory answer, no matter what I say. We haven’t played well for two weeks in a row. For a matter of fact, we played very poorly and the reason for that is we need some real soul searching, not only by me, but by the people in that locker room.

Q: Is it more difficult when your defense isn’t forcing any turnovers?A: Anything to spark or creating the spark. I think, to be honest with you, we haven’t made any really significant plays and people rally around those kinds of things as well. There’s little parts of each game in the beginning where if something good would have happened, who knows? For example, how do you explain special teams playing as well as they played and the other two phases as poorly? That’s a very good question.

Q: Those are a lot of younger players, too, on special teams.A: Those are normally the guys that are fighting for a job. To hang on.

Q: Correlation there?A: Not coming from me.

Q: Is that how you summon up confidence, by making plays?A: I think that if you play as we’ve played for a couple of weeks, you have pretty much every reason to not have a lot of confidence. Make some plays and get it going and see how that works. See if that doesn’t answer some questions for you. Rally the troops.

Q: It seems you guys have tried a lot of different things on defense in recent weeks:A: And we’ll keep trying. We haven’t had a turnover in two games and that’s been a real thriving point for us. When we have played well and won, we’ve taken the ball away and we’ve not given it away.